Secplicity Blog - Research

Law Enforcement Infiltrate and Seize Hive Ransomware Operation

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In a sudden, stunning announcement today, the United States Department of Justice, the FBI, and federal agencies from 13 countries from Europol, announced the seizure of the transnational Hive ransomware operation. The seizure was part of a months-long operation that began in late July 2022 when the…

Cybersecurity News: Malvertising, Ransomware, and Alleged IRS Breach

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Regarding malware, breaches, and the overall threat landscape, 2023 is off to a dynamic start. Malvertising (malicious advertising) continues to be a successful attack vector for hackers, especially from sponsored ads via Google searches. Jon DiMaggio released his long-awaited Ransomware Diary…

Endurance Ransomware Claims Breach of US Federal Government

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The WatchGuard Security Team spends a lot of time chasing ransomware extortion groups throughout the dark web. So, it only fits that one of the newer ransomware extortion groups is named Endurance Ransomware. It appears this "group" is one individual known as IntelBroker, who has allegedly breached…

Over a Billion Records Leaked in Shanghai National Police Database Hack

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This past week, a hacker by the name of ChinaDan allegedly breached the Shanghai National Police (SHGA) database and has put the nearly 23 TB of data up for sale for 10 bitcoin (BTC), or a little over $200k USD as of this writing. ChinaDan claims the data contains “information on 1 Billion Chinese…

LockBit Ransomware Group Introduces Bug Bounties and More

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The LockBit ransomware group has unveiled a new website – LockBit 3.0 – to host their ransom extortions and data leaks. The website includes several new features, including an unprecedented bug bounty program to assist the group in securing their site; acceptance of the privacy cryptocurrency, Zcash…

Log4j Becomes The Highest Detected Vulnerability Days After Release

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Log4Shell attacks have spread throughout the Internet due to the ease with which attackers can perform them. The WatchGuard Threat Lab sees a sample of these attacks from our customers’ perspectives when they opt to provide anonymized threat intelligence data from their Fireboxes. This limited data…

Critical RCE Vulnerability in Log4J2

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[Updated 13-12-2021: Additional information for WatchGuard customers] On Thursday, security researchers disclosed a critical, unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in log4j2, a popular and widely used logging library for java applications. CVE-2021-44228 is a full 10.0 on the…

The Evolution of Phishing: A WatchGuard Real-World Example

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Phishing is a type of social engineering attack where threat actors attempt to trick users into providing sensitive information via email. Typically, this involves creating a phishing campaign where threat actors will send the same phishing email to a large batch of recipients in an attempt to trick…